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Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories
A bestselling music historian follows Jelly Roll Morton on a journey through the hidden worlds and forbidden songs of early blues and jazz.
In Jelly Roll Censored Songs and Hidden Histories, Elijah Wald takes readers on a journey into the hidden and censored world of early blues and jazz, guided by the legendary New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Morton became nationally famous as a composer and bandleader in the 1920s, but got his start twenty years earlier, entertaining customers in the city’s famous bordellos and singing rough blues in Gulf Coast honky-tonks. He recorded an oral history of that time in 1938, but the most distinctive songs were hidden away for over fifty years, because the language and themes were as wild and raunchy as anything in gangsta rap.
Those songs inspired Wald to explore how much other history had been locked away and censored, and this book is the result of that quest. Full of previously unpublished lyrics and stories, it paints a new and surprising picture of the dawn of American popular music, when jazz and blues were still the private, after-hours music of the Black "sporting world." It gives new insight into familiar figures like Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong, and introduces forgotten characters like Ready Money, the New Orleans sex worker and pickpocket who ended up owning one of the largest Black hotels on the West Coast.
Revelatory and fascinating, these songs and stories provide an alternate view of Black culture at the turn of the twentieth century, when a new generation was shaping lives their parents could not have imagined and art that transformed popular culture around the world—the birth of a joyous, angry, desperate, loving, and ferociously funny tradition that resurfaced in hip-hop and continues to inspire young artists in a new millennium.
In Jelly Roll Censored Songs and Hidden Histories, Elijah Wald takes readers on a journey into the hidden and censored world of early blues and jazz, guided by the legendary New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Morton became nationally famous as a composer and bandleader in the 1920s, but got his start twenty years earlier, entertaining customers in the city’s famous bordellos and singing rough blues in Gulf Coast honky-tonks. He recorded an oral history of that time in 1938, but the most distinctive songs were hidden away for over fifty years, because the language and themes were as wild and raunchy as anything in gangsta rap.
Those songs inspired Wald to explore how much other history had been locked away and censored, and this book is the result of that quest. Full of previously unpublished lyrics and stories, it paints a new and surprising picture of the dawn of American popular music, when jazz and blues were still the private, after-hours music of the Black "sporting world." It gives new insight into familiar figures like Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong, and introduces forgotten characters like Ready Money, the New Orleans sex worker and pickpocket who ended up owning one of the largest Black hotels on the West Coast.
Revelatory and fascinating, these songs and stories provide an alternate view of Black culture at the turn of the twentieth century, when a new generation was shaping lives their parents could not have imagined and art that transformed popular culture around the world—the birth of a joyous, angry, desperate, loving, and ferociously funny tradition that resurfaced in hip-hop and continues to inspire young artists in a new millennium.
294 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 2, 2024
14 people are currently reading
215 people want to read
About the author
Elijah Wald
32 books70 followersElijah Wald is a musician and writer, with nine published books. Most are about music (blues, folk, world, and Mexican drug ballads), with one about hitchhiking.
His new book is a revisionist history of popular music, throwing out the usual critical conventions and instead looking at what mainstream pop fans were actually listening and dancing to over the years.
At readings, he also plays guitar and sings...why not?"
His new book is a revisionist history of popular music, throwing out the usual critical conventions and instead looking at what mainstream pop fans were actually listening and dancing to over the years.
At readings, he also plays guitar and sings...why not?"
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
May 18, 2024
Did this book do what is was intended to do? Yes. Is this book for everyone? Absolutely not.
The author does a thorough job of documenting the life, times and songs of Jelly Roll Morton and his contemporaries. He explains why we have so little evidence today of the language and lifestyles described by the artists of the early blues and jazz era. In a nutshell: 4 layers of censorship. 1) the artists themselves, when performing in front of a white audience or a microphone, would hold back the lyrics they would sing in front of an all black audience. 2) the recorder - the person running a recording device or transcribing lyrics for sheet music would shy away from what might be offensive. 3) the publisher/distributor would decline to invest in duplication/distribution of such material. 4) the consumers/critics - would be reluctant to have/share such content. These filters have pretty much evaporated with today's technologies. Look at current songs on Spotify, etc. and notice how many sings have "explicit" tags on them. Spend some time on social media and see what artists are posting directly.
The author did the digging, interviews and research to gather and document examples of tunes and how they evolved as they passsed from one artist and area to another. And the language was indeed Explicit. Think George Carlin's "7 dirty words". Add to that the 77 euphemisms used in the black community for those and similar words.
This book is educational in many ways, but I don't expect it to show up in any school libraries.
The author does a thorough job of documenting the life, times and songs of Jelly Roll Morton and his contemporaries. He explains why we have so little evidence today of the language and lifestyles described by the artists of the early blues and jazz era. In a nutshell: 4 layers of censorship. 1) the artists themselves, when performing in front of a white audience or a microphone, would hold back the lyrics they would sing in front of an all black audience. 2) the recorder - the person running a recording device or transcribing lyrics for sheet music would shy away from what might be offensive. 3) the publisher/distributor would decline to invest in duplication/distribution of such material. 4) the consumers/critics - would be reluctant to have/share such content. These filters have pretty much evaporated with today's technologies. Look at current songs on Spotify, etc. and notice how many sings have "explicit" tags on them. Spend some time on social media and see what artists are posting directly.
The author did the digging, interviews and research to gather and document examples of tunes and how they evolved as they passsed from one artist and area to another. And the language was indeed Explicit. Think George Carlin's "7 dirty words". Add to that the 77 euphemisms used in the black community for those and similar words.
This book is educational in many ways, but I don't expect it to show up in any school libraries.
June 28, 2024
Detailed investigation into the wild world of the earliest jazz and blues over 100 years ago, especially covering themes of sex and crime in the lyrics. I’ve read a few other books by Wald, he’s an incredible researcher. Gives a great picture of the places where this music was played and developed - much of it in houses of (ahem) ill-repute.
June 17, 2025
While I'm on a roll (no pun intended) of reviewing books I read ages ago, THIS ONE. I have figured out that I should read or listen to any music-based book like this with ready access to YouTube so I can listen to the songs under discussion. This really brought the book to life for me. Without it, the narrator is just reading the lyrics ... boring.
The main topic of the book is songs about sex, as they were prime candidates for censorship. There's some coverage of murder ballads too. I can't criticize a book for being about what it's about, but still I wanted more variety, e.g. blues about working in the slaughterhouse and other topics that were blues subjects.
The main topic of the book is songs about sex, as they were prime candidates for censorship. There's some coverage of murder ballads too. I can't criticize a book for being about what it's about, but still I wanted more variety, e.g. blues about working in the slaughterhouse and other topics that were blues subjects.
February 21, 2025
I enjoyed the discussions around methods and archives as much as the specific music insights.
September 2, 2024
Summary/Review:
The latest work from music historian Elijah Wald explores the hidden side of Black American music from the early 20th century. If you think today's rap music, or even the songs of young pop stars, contains a lot of expletives, violence, and sexually suggestive lyrics, well this was also true of folk, ragtime, blues, and early jazz. Black musicians catered their material to their audiences which could vary from high class clubs for white people to late nights at the bordello when sex workers would enjoy tunes of same-sex attraction and satisfaction.
Central to the book is Jelly Roll Morton's 1938 recordings for Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. The session serves as a prism of how white collectors even with the best of intentions had preconceived notions of what counted as the origins of blues and jazz (with a belief that music from the country was more "authentic") and how artists like Morton continue to cater to what his audience wants as well as some self-promotion of his own role in the history. Morton's music was out of style by 1938 but he was still young enough to consider the Library of Congress sessions an opportunity to advance his career.
This book is an eye-opening reexamination of popular music history. The songs Wald cites are raunchy, scatological, brutal, racially stereotyped, sexist, and sometimes just gross. That can serve as a content warning. But when the past is unsanitized it also opens insight into people of the past being not so different from ourselves.
Favorite Passages:
"This book includes many quotations and lyrics that some readers will find offensive. I find some of them offensive myself. I was tempted to censor some passages, but in a book that criticizes other writers for censorship and examines the ways their viewpoints and prejudices affected their work, I have no business shielding myself." - p. xiv
"Unlike the songs of sailors, cowboys, soldiers, and men's clubs, which are often openly hostile to women, blues was typically performed in venues where women were present, often sung by women and with women as the most active and enthusiastic audience." - p. 20
"Those early blues were not songs in the sense that someone born in 1915 - someone like Alan Lomax - grew up thinking of a song. Before songs were regularly marketed on sheet music or records, they were often just a musical equivalent of stories.... if you ask someone the title of a story they just told, they will tend to be puzzled by the question..." - p. 29
"Nostalgic recollections of the 'gay nineties' and the era before Prohibition often include men harmonizing around a back-room piano, and for white, middle-class men, singing rough lyrics about Black barrelhouse life provided the same vicarious pleasure their great-grandsons would get from bumping gangsta rap." - p. 63
"This kind of segregation remains common in folkore studies and, as with other forms of segregation, the separation is not equal: studies of white culture in the United States have always included ragtime, blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll, and more recently rap as popular elements, but the fact that Black Americans danced square dances and waltzes and sang 'She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain' and 'Danny Boy' is generally treated as irrelevant to their culture - or, if relevant, as evidence that they were subject to Euro-American cultural hegemony rather than because Afro-American culture is as broad and omnivorous as any on earth." - p. 100
"So it is worth remembering that in cultural terms - in terms of the audience, the neighborhoods, and the attitudes of insiders and outsiders alike - a rap show in a Black neighborhood club is closer to a night at the Funky Butt than any jazz concert has been for almost a century, beset by the same stereotypes and dangers and the same appreciation of rough comedy and rhyming." - p. 142
"I'm telling these stories to give a sense of some people who were more central to the New Orleans sporting world than any musician but have been completely ignored by historians, and to present some women involved in sex work as notable individuals who exercised control over their lives and the people around them. If their environment was often exploitative and abusive, they were all the more celebrated for turning the tables on the exploiters and gaining a stature they could never have attained in the straight world." - p. 172
"Sexually explicit entertainment is often euphemistically called 'adult' but tends to be conspicuously adolescent, designed as much to assuage male fears as to satisfy male desires, and wildly unrealistic about female desires." - p. 201
"Folklorists in the early twentieth century were fascinated by the improvisational facility of Black singers. White ballad singers were celebrated for their ability to recall lyrics learned and preserved over generations; their performances inevitably varied, but most did their best to repeat what they had heard from previous singers, and the results were valued as historical artifacts. Some Black singers did the same, but others were noted for their ability to extemporize verses to even the most familiar ballads." - p. 228
"In hindsight many of us hear the Black murder ballads of the 1890s as an early form of blues, but to musicians of [Jelly Roll Morton's] generation those songs must have sounded as dated as the rock 'n' roll 'oldies' of the 1950s to young Black dancers in the age of James Brown and Aretha Franklin." - p. 263
"...in oral traditions, repeating something exactly does not mean producing a stenographic copy; it means accurately replicating the experience, which involves both more and less than the words." - p. 268
The latest work from music historian Elijah Wald explores the hidden side of Black American music from the early 20th century. If you think today's rap music, or even the songs of young pop stars, contains a lot of expletives, violence, and sexually suggestive lyrics, well this was also true of folk, ragtime, blues, and early jazz. Black musicians catered their material to their audiences which could vary from high class clubs for white people to late nights at the bordello when sex workers would enjoy tunes of same-sex attraction and satisfaction.
Central to the book is Jelly Roll Morton's 1938 recordings for Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. The session serves as a prism of how white collectors even with the best of intentions had preconceived notions of what counted as the origins of blues and jazz (with a belief that music from the country was more "authentic") and how artists like Morton continue to cater to what his audience wants as well as some self-promotion of his own role in the history. Morton's music was out of style by 1938 but he was still young enough to consider the Library of Congress sessions an opportunity to advance his career.
This book is an eye-opening reexamination of popular music history. The songs Wald cites are raunchy, scatological, brutal, racially stereotyped, sexist, and sometimes just gross. That can serve as a content warning. But when the past is unsanitized it also opens insight into people of the past being not so different from ourselves.
Favorite Passages:
"This book includes many quotations and lyrics that some readers will find offensive. I find some of them offensive myself. I was tempted to censor some passages, but in a book that criticizes other writers for censorship and examines the ways their viewpoints and prejudices affected their work, I have no business shielding myself." - p. xiv
"Unlike the songs of sailors, cowboys, soldiers, and men's clubs, which are often openly hostile to women, blues was typically performed in venues where women were present, often sung by women and with women as the most active and enthusiastic audience." - p. 20
"Those early blues were not songs in the sense that someone born in 1915 - someone like Alan Lomax - grew up thinking of a song. Before songs were regularly marketed on sheet music or records, they were often just a musical equivalent of stories.... if you ask someone the title of a story they just told, they will tend to be puzzled by the question..." - p. 29
"Nostalgic recollections of the 'gay nineties' and the era before Prohibition often include men harmonizing around a back-room piano, and for white, middle-class men, singing rough lyrics about Black barrelhouse life provided the same vicarious pleasure their great-grandsons would get from bumping gangsta rap." - p. 63
"This kind of segregation remains common in folkore studies and, as with other forms of segregation, the separation is not equal: studies of white culture in the United States have always included ragtime, blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll, and more recently rap as popular elements, but the fact that Black Americans danced square dances and waltzes and sang 'She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain' and 'Danny Boy' is generally treated as irrelevant to their culture - or, if relevant, as evidence that they were subject to Euro-American cultural hegemony rather than because Afro-American culture is as broad and omnivorous as any on earth." - p. 100
"So it is worth remembering that in cultural terms - in terms of the audience, the neighborhoods, and the attitudes of insiders and outsiders alike - a rap show in a Black neighborhood club is closer to a night at the Funky Butt than any jazz concert has been for almost a century, beset by the same stereotypes and dangers and the same appreciation of rough comedy and rhyming." - p. 142
"I'm telling these stories to give a sense of some people who were more central to the New Orleans sporting world than any musician but have been completely ignored by historians, and to present some women involved in sex work as notable individuals who exercised control over their lives and the people around them. If their environment was often exploitative and abusive, they were all the more celebrated for turning the tables on the exploiters and gaining a stature they could never have attained in the straight world." - p. 172
"Sexually explicit entertainment is often euphemistically called 'adult' but tends to be conspicuously adolescent, designed as much to assuage male fears as to satisfy male desires, and wildly unrealistic about female desires." - p. 201
"Folklorists in the early twentieth century were fascinated by the improvisational facility of Black singers. White ballad singers were celebrated for their ability to recall lyrics learned and preserved over generations; their performances inevitably varied, but most did their best to repeat what they had heard from previous singers, and the results were valued as historical artifacts. Some Black singers did the same, but others were noted for their ability to extemporize verses to even the most familiar ballads." - p. 228
"In hindsight many of us hear the Black murder ballads of the 1890s as an early form of blues, but to musicians of [Jelly Roll Morton's] generation those songs must have sounded as dated as the rock 'n' roll 'oldies' of the 1950s to young Black dancers in the age of James Brown and Aretha Franklin." - p. 263
"...in oral traditions, repeating something exactly does not mean producing a stenographic copy; it means accurately replicating the experience, which involves both more and less than the words." - p. 268
December 22, 2023
This book is not for the feint of heart. It is for those who love New Orleans, old time blues and jazz. Who knew that the early lyrics to so many old songs were so obscene. The is one of the few books I’ve read that revolves around obscenity. What a great history of the singers and songwriters who originated in New Orleans who migrated out to change the face of American music. So many great details about Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey to name a few. I applaud the author, Elijah Wald, who did such great research and wrote such a compelling book. This book is not just about Jelly Roll Morton, but about the evolution of modern music.
February 7, 2024
My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Hachette Books for an advance copy of this look at the history of blue music, censorship, bawdy lyrics and and life of one of America's greatest musicians.
Rock and roll music received its name for a popular term used in a lot of blues songs for what might follow after a night of dancing or drinking. Or for the feeling that people would get for being on the ocean. This is how a lot of music history is looked at. Some don't want to discuss the more bawdy stories, the dirty origins of many of their favorite songs, or even where their favorite musicians learned their craft. That supposed 10,000 hours that make a musician a star. A lot of those 10,000 hours would be played in houses of ill repute, where the songs might be about the customers around them, good and bad. Jelly Roll Morton was a composer and musician who played thousands of hours in his youth in places youth shouldn't really be. Learning the blues by both living them, and observing the people around him, and listening to their stories. And how they spoke and how they said it. Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories by musical historian and writer Elijah Wald is part biography of Morton, a look at songs that were rich and raw, and keep away from innocent ears, changing how we perceive and even hear blues music today.
Jelly Roll Morton was a man of mystery with different names, different birthdays and lots of stories about him. Morton grew up in the South in New Orleans, and worked as a pianist in many of the places that young men were warned to stay away from, and yet never did. Playing these kind of places introduced Morton to an underworld, where transactions for money were the norm, where many made fortunes, or lost fortunes and lives. Morton's songs were about these people, but as he grew famous he tended to shy away from his blues songs. In 1938 Morton played songs for famed ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax that were different than most traditional blue music. These songs were long, with many verses, almost operas with different voices, narratives, and a lot of bawdy talk. Only a bit more than thirty minutes of this recording still exists, and was not heard for over fifty years, because of the slang words used. And this caused our author, Elijah Ward to wonder what other great music was being ignored, because the language was too rough for sensitives souls.
A very different kind of music history book, that serves as both a biography on Morton, and about language, song, and a lot more. I have read histories about jazz and the blues before, but written in this kind of style, and with more of an emphasis on why so much music from this era is lost and why. Little warning there is a lot of rough language in this book, some that is kind of unnerving more than shocking. Wald discusses this in the beginning of the book in a very interesting essay about what should be told, and what shouldn't be. I found the information about Morton very interesting, but the history about the blues and language I thought was the best part of the book. A completely different approach to both studying and explaining the music and its times. Wald wrote a previous book Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas, which I enjoyed and was impressed with the amount of work and research. This book is even better, and the effort put into this both in writing, and explaining blues music is very rewarding.
Recommended for musical historians, and those that are interested in both jazz and the blues and their origins. Also for those who want to learn a bit about America, music, censorship, and how art can be hidden, but somehow always finds an audience. Elijah Wald is a very fine writer and I can't wait to read more by him.
Rock and roll music received its name for a popular term used in a lot of blues songs for what might follow after a night of dancing or drinking. Or for the feeling that people would get for being on the ocean. This is how a lot of music history is looked at. Some don't want to discuss the more bawdy stories, the dirty origins of many of their favorite songs, or even where their favorite musicians learned their craft. That supposed 10,000 hours that make a musician a star. A lot of those 10,000 hours would be played in houses of ill repute, where the songs might be about the customers around them, good and bad. Jelly Roll Morton was a composer and musician who played thousands of hours in his youth in places youth shouldn't really be. Learning the blues by both living them, and observing the people around him, and listening to their stories. And how they spoke and how they said it. Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories by musical historian and writer Elijah Wald is part biography of Morton, a look at songs that were rich and raw, and keep away from innocent ears, changing how we perceive and even hear blues music today.
Jelly Roll Morton was a man of mystery with different names, different birthdays and lots of stories about him. Morton grew up in the South in New Orleans, and worked as a pianist in many of the places that young men were warned to stay away from, and yet never did. Playing these kind of places introduced Morton to an underworld, where transactions for money were the norm, where many made fortunes, or lost fortunes and lives. Morton's songs were about these people, but as he grew famous he tended to shy away from his blues songs. In 1938 Morton played songs for famed ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax that were different than most traditional blue music. These songs were long, with many verses, almost operas with different voices, narratives, and a lot of bawdy talk. Only a bit more than thirty minutes of this recording still exists, and was not heard for over fifty years, because of the slang words used. And this caused our author, Elijah Ward to wonder what other great music was being ignored, because the language was too rough for sensitives souls.
A very different kind of music history book, that serves as both a biography on Morton, and about language, song, and a lot more. I have read histories about jazz and the blues before, but written in this kind of style, and with more of an emphasis on why so much music from this era is lost and why. Little warning there is a lot of rough language in this book, some that is kind of unnerving more than shocking. Wald discusses this in the beginning of the book in a very interesting essay about what should be told, and what shouldn't be. I found the information about Morton very interesting, but the history about the blues and language I thought was the best part of the book. A completely different approach to both studying and explaining the music and its times. Wald wrote a previous book Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas, which I enjoyed and was impressed with the amount of work and research. This book is even better, and the effort put into this both in writing, and explaining blues music is very rewarding.
Recommended for musical historians, and those that are interested in both jazz and the blues and their origins. Also for those who want to learn a bit about America, music, censorship, and how art can be hidden, but somehow always finds an audience. Elijah Wald is a very fine writer and I can't wait to read more by him.
April 18, 2024
In 1938 Jelly Roll Morton recorded hours of songs and stories at the Concert Hall of the Library of Congress. The sessions were arranged by Alan Lomax, the legendary ethnomusicologist. Lomax recorded Woody Guthrie, Bib Bill Broonzy, Leadbelly, Muddy Waters and hundreds more in a crusade to preserve true American folk music of white and black Americans.
Jelly Roll Morton (1890 - 1941) had played and recorded in New Orleans since he 14. He started out playing piano in a brothel. He was one of the biggest names to come out of New Orleans. By 1938 he wanted to be a popular music star. Lomax wanted to hear the old songs from New Orleans.
Lomax convinced Morton to play some of the stuff he leaned in the brothels, bars and streets of turn of the century New Orleans. The result was recordings of some of the dirtiest lyrics recorded up to that date. Songs with lines like "I killed the bitch because she fucked my man" or "I want you to give me some of that good c---t you got." (Not sure why I draw the line at that word, but I do)
Wald says that the recordings inspired hm to study the raunchy, dirty, sexy songs that were part of American music before it was recorded and played on the radio. What he shows, in detail, is that explicit, sex drenched, foul languaged songs were sung all over America prior to 1910 or so. In particular, the blues had a long and deep tradition of bawdy and downright filthy songs.
Wald has dug up 100s of lyrics that would match the raunchiest of any modern rappers. In fact, at times he traces lines in modern rap songs to racy blues songs from the pre-recording era.
He also explains the meaning of many of the blues lyrics that are mysterious these days. "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor" is a beautiful classic blues song. I thought it was a mourning song. Wald shows that the idea was that a guy cheating with a married woman didn't want to leave any evidence in her martial bed so she would make a pallet on the floor for them to use. (This has an interesting relevance to the Bruce Springsteen episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm.)
I have also heard the term "shave em dry" in blues songs over the years. I never understood it. Wald explains that a barber lathers you up with hot water and soap and shaves you. When someone cuts your throat with a razor, that is ''shave em dry", except that in other songs it has sexual connotation of intercourse.
"Hesitation Blues", done in a wonderful version by Hot Tuna, is another song with heavy sexual references that went right over my head.
Wald did a huge amount of research for the book. He wrestles with some complicated issues. Many of the songs he uncovers are flat out misogynist, but some can be read as empowering to women. Gays and lesbians are usually treated with disdain, but Wald argus that the attitudes about them were much more complicated in the preWW1 period than after it.
He spends time focusing on how the fact that most collectors of old songs were white middle-class men affected which songs got collected and published and which did not. Although, to be fair, many of the lyrics he uncovers could not have been published anywhere in America prior to the 1960s.
This is a hidden history. It is well written and full of fascinating stories. It is also a good corrective to "the good old days when everyone was nice and moral" myth.
Jelly Roll Morton (1890 - 1941) had played and recorded in New Orleans since he 14. He started out playing piano in a brothel. He was one of the biggest names to come out of New Orleans. By 1938 he wanted to be a popular music star. Lomax wanted to hear the old songs from New Orleans.
Lomax convinced Morton to play some of the stuff he leaned in the brothels, bars and streets of turn of the century New Orleans. The result was recordings of some of the dirtiest lyrics recorded up to that date. Songs with lines like "I killed the bitch because she fucked my man" or "I want you to give me some of that good c---t you got." (Not sure why I draw the line at that word, but I do)
Wald says that the recordings inspired hm to study the raunchy, dirty, sexy songs that were part of American music before it was recorded and played on the radio. What he shows, in detail, is that explicit, sex drenched, foul languaged songs were sung all over America prior to 1910 or so. In particular, the blues had a long and deep tradition of bawdy and downright filthy songs.
Wald has dug up 100s of lyrics that would match the raunchiest of any modern rappers. In fact, at times he traces lines in modern rap songs to racy blues songs from the pre-recording era.
He also explains the meaning of many of the blues lyrics that are mysterious these days. "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor" is a beautiful classic blues song. I thought it was a mourning song. Wald shows that the idea was that a guy cheating with a married woman didn't want to leave any evidence in her martial bed so she would make a pallet on the floor for them to use. (This has an interesting relevance to the Bruce Springsteen episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm.)
I have also heard the term "shave em dry" in blues songs over the years. I never understood it. Wald explains that a barber lathers you up with hot water and soap and shaves you. When someone cuts your throat with a razor, that is ''shave em dry", except that in other songs it has sexual connotation of intercourse.
"Hesitation Blues", done in a wonderful version by Hot Tuna, is another song with heavy sexual references that went right over my head.
Wald did a huge amount of research for the book. He wrestles with some complicated issues. Many of the songs he uncovers are flat out misogynist, but some can be read as empowering to women. Gays and lesbians are usually treated with disdain, but Wald argus that the attitudes about them were much more complicated in the preWW1 period than after it.
He spends time focusing on how the fact that most collectors of old songs were white middle-class men affected which songs got collected and published and which did not. Although, to be fair, many of the lyrics he uncovers could not have been published anywhere in America prior to the 1960s.
This is a hidden history. It is well written and full of fascinating stories. It is also a good corrective to "the good old days when everyone was nice and moral" myth.
July 26, 2024
This book is less a history than a ramble. A brilliant ramble, to be sure, but Mr. Wald himself admits that most of the history he hopes to explore . . of the southern Black musical tradition that evolved into ragtime, blues, and jazz . . is poorly documented, and the records which survive are conflicting and contradictory. So, he has a pretty good excuse to indulge in anecdotes and speculation. The touchstone for these musings is a 1938 recording of the famous New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton by the father-son folklorist team Alan and John Lomax. Morton sang, played and talked for hours, teaching the ersatz anthropologists that many an entry in the Great American Songbook is a sanitized version of a dirty old ballad. Morton was a genius, but also a bit of a braggart and a fabulist, but Mr. Wald doesn't doubt that his reminiscences are true in spirit. Neither do I.
June 10, 2024
This book is so well written, I want more. I am a rabid blues fan and really learned a lot. I have many of the recording and the history and meanings of so much lost slang is explained. The best part is the succinct description of how much this music is reflected in everything that followed. I have not been a fan of Rap music but it makes a lot more sense after reading this book.I love how it’s pointed out that so much music history has been neglected and consequently forgotten. I would love to thank the author personally some day. I will be looking for more.
July 9, 2024
A great book for scholars, with plenty of footnotes and a good index.
Not so good for the rest of us, who don't need all the details.
And, speaking for myself, after a while the repetitive tales of "sporting life," ie, prostitution, become depressing. The simple-minded lyrics are not exactly Shakepeare. The blues, much as I like them, are not exactly Mozart. Or Dire Straits, Talking Heads, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, etc.
That said, the author writes well, and I intend to read many of his other books.
Not so good for the rest of us, who don't need all the details.
And, speaking for myself, after a while the repetitive tales of "sporting life," ie, prostitution, become depressing. The simple-minded lyrics are not exactly Shakepeare. The blues, much as I like them, are not exactly Mozart. Or Dire Straits, Talking Heads, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, etc.
That said, the author writes well, and I intend to read many of his other books.
May 10, 2024
An interesting book. It covers the styles and era of music I like, and provides backstories about context that are right up my alley. I'm glad someone did all this digging. The only drawback was that there was no real narrative or storyline. It was more of one thing after another. Maybe there's really no particular story to tell. I did appreciate the last few pages where the author tried to wrap up his investigation.
August 13, 2024
I had forgotten that I had read one of Elijah Wald's books before and while that one was okay, this one is dull. If Wald only likes 'dirty songs,' and Mexican 'drug songs;' then you know what sort of music person Wald is. He barely scratches the surface of Jelly Roll and the book isn't just about him, Buddy Bolden features but I didn't get that far.
August 31, 2024
An amazing book on a long neglected subject. I don't have enough stars to give it. If someone is interested in the blues, this would be a great introduction as it connects it to modern day lyrics. "WAP" didn't come out of nothing. It has roots that date back centuries.
January 31, 2025
Informative, well-researched foray into the history of music that had been censored for public consumption. Explore hidden meanings, double-entendres, and code which was used to get past censors, but communicate with those "in the know". Quite fascinating.
July 28, 2024
Anyone interested in blues history or just wants to learn about some old dirty songs should definitely pick this up.
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